Driverless cars: the key to safety is a fully integrated infrastructure

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Autonomous vehicles will be on our roads within three years, according to Chancellor Phillip Hammond, and there are long-standing concerns over their safety, despite the expectation they will be substantially less dangerous than human drivers.

Yet, while fears over autonomous vehicles have until now centred on failures of the vehicles’s Artificial Intelligence or onboard sensors, the biggest risk to road safety comes from the fragmented nature of the automotive and transport market itself.

Autonomous vehicles and the systems which support them are being built with thousands of rival services, sensors and communication systems which are not designed to communicate with each other. The systems...